4.11.06

Okami

From Clive Thompson at Wired:

"Are games a form of art?

"This question always provokes bloated arguments. Fans insist that their games are just as culturally important and nuanced as anything in a museum or a bookstore. Detractors snipe that video games are too twitchy, too violent and too profoundly a waste of time to qualify. It's a debate that never goes anywhere because the participants are talking about two completely different things.

"So it was with glee that I cracked open Okami, a game that neatly dodges around this morass with a brilliant gameplay concept: You have to actually perform art to play the game. With Okami, the division between games and art collapses, as Douglas Adams might have it, 'in a puff of logic.'

"It works like this: In Okami, you play as a wolf that is the incarnation of an ancient Japanese god -- and that has the power to literally draw things into existence. At any point in the game, you can hit a button and the scene freezes, transforming into a piece of parchment. You wield a traditional Japanese brush and ink objects on the parchment. When you unfreeze the scene, presto: Whatever you've painted transforms into the real, solid thing."